5/5
"'Don't throw it away,' Noah whispered." - Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
I'm not a big re-reader (side note: does Goodreads always register re-read books as being read twice on the same day, doubling up its contribution to your Reading Challenge in the process?), but I've decided to embrace the intoxicating hype for Greywaren and re-read The Raven Cycle and the first two books of the Dreamer Trilogy in the run-up to the 18th October 2022.
Best. Decision. Ever.
The second time around, The Raven Boys is a completely different book. This is mostly Ronan and Noah's fault. About 80% of everything Ronan says and does is a reference to his dreaming and another 10% is him pining after Adam. Likewise with Noah in the first half regarding him being a literal ghost. Knowing how Ronan feels about Adam from the start makes the fact that Adam regards hanging out with Ronan as the price he has to pay to be friends with Gansey absolutely hilarious - all the months they've known each other and Ronan hasn't managed to make any sort of positive impression on him at all. Adam's really out here carrying the enemies part of this enemies to lovers plotline on his own.
Adam seems to see himself and Ronan as vying over Gansey's friendship. He thinks that Gansey bails Ronan out too much, which is ironic considering that Gansey spends the whole damn book (and has apparently spent a good portion of their friendship) trying to help Adam out and Adam just won't let him. Then again, maybe that's the problem. Ronan can afford to let Gansey fight his battles. Adam can't. That isn't to say I'm on Gansey's side here though. Honestly, I'm more on Adam's, partly because I too am too stubborn for my own good and have more pride than sense, but mostly because Gansey is at his worst dealing with Adam. They're both angry, but there's really no excuse for the victim-blaming. Isn't Adam suffering enough being beaten by his father, without his friend yelling at him for getting beaten by his father? I would argue that Gansey and Adam is the most important relationship in The Raven Boys - yes, even more so than Blue and Adam or Blue and Gansey - simply because there's so much tension there. It builds up, and up, and up, and when it boils over Adam runs off to wake the ley line. Gansey's sense of betrayal over this is important, because it exposes that Adam was kind of right all along - Gansey did think he could control him. Not necessarily in a cruel way, but certainly to the point where if he told him not to do something Adam would listen.
One thing that really struck me this time round was how much everyone around Ronan really just wants what's best for him. Declan and Gansey aren't clashing because one of them's right and one of them's wrong, they're clashing because they both want him to be okay and they have very different ideas about how to go about ensuring that. Personally, I think the real villain here is Aglionby. The timeline is... kind of shaky (it's physically impossible for Gansey to have arrived in Henrietta 18 months ago and have been friends with Adam for 18 months if he'd been friends with Ronan for months before he met Adam, unless he knew Ronan before he moved to Henrietta... which would likely have come up by now), but what we do know is that sometime in the last eighteen months Ronan quite literally found his father murdered in the driveway of their family home, which he and his brothers were promptly exiled from by said father's will. Then, six months ago, he tried to kill himself. This is all really recent and we know from Gansey's POV chapters that Ronan was a completely different person before his father died - it's something he struggles with, mourning the loss of the friend he knew whilst trying to hold on to the one he has now - but Aglionby are out here acting like they've been oh so patient and (possible) failing grades are the last straw. It sounds to me more like they're too scared of their grade average being dragged down to actually care about their students as people. Everything in the Dreamer Trilogy seems almost inevitable when you look at the strength of the support system Ronan has throughout The Raven Cycle. The first time round, I don't think I clocked how - and I hate to put it like this but the most accurate word really is - fragile a character he is. The skipping school makes it easy to buy into the idea that he simply doesn't care, but reading it now - with eight years more life experience - it's obvious that he's given up on himself after everything that's happened. Combined with all his self-destructive behaviours, it paints a picture of a kid who doesn't care about his future because he doesn't plan to have one. Gansey accuses him of as much, "you don't care if you live or die."
Throughout the series, Noah is as much of a plot device as a character, so it's really sweet to see how attached the other members of the group are to him. From Blue's almost instant soft spot for him, to Ronan writing remembered on the car, to what Adam says when he confronts Whelk in Cabeswater, the fact that his existence is tenuous at best and they didn't know him when he was living doesn't matter. Noah is one of them.
Discounting Neeve, who returns later, the first villain of the series is really Barrington Whelk. Whelk is every negative stereotype about little rich boys with too much of daddy's money - he's arrogant, entitled, misogynistic, and that's just the tip of the iceberg - but he could have been a sympathetic villain. Even if his fall basically just put him on the same level as the average twenty-something, he still lost his whole life as he knew it through no fault of his own. It's how he reacts to it that makes him unsympathetic. As Adam puts it, "why not someone horrible?"
I could write so, so much more, but this has already taken me over three hours.
God, I love this series.
Who's your favourite Raven Cycle character?
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